CompTIA Security Plus Mock Test Q587

Which of the following BEST describes a SQL Injection attack?

A. The attacker attempts to have the receiving server pass information to a back-end database from which it can compromise the stored information.B. The attacker attempts to have the receiving server run a payload using programming commonly found on web servers.C. The attacker overwhelms a system or application, causing it to crash and bring the server down to cause an outage.D. The attacker overwhelms a system or application, causing it to crash, and then redirects the memory address to read from a location holding the payload.

Correct Answer: ASection: Threats and Vulnerabilities

Explanation:
SQL injection is a code injection technique, used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e.g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application’s software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. SQL injection is mostly known as an attack vector for websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database.

Incorrect Answers:
B: “using programming commonly found on web servers” describes a cross-site scripting or XML injection attack. It does not describe a SQL injection attack.
C: Examples of an attack that “overwhelms a system or application, causing it to crash and bring the server down” are DDoS attack, Syn floods and other flooding attacks. The description does not describe a SQL injection attack.
D: The description “overwhelms a system or application, causing it to crash, and then redirects the memory address to read from a location holding the payload” is describing a buffer overflow attack, not an SQL injection attack.